On May 9th, Russia held its iconic annual Victory Day parade to honour the sacrifices of its soldiers and civilians during its four-year war against Nazi Germany. When the president, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, he didn’t anticipate a fight that would last longer than the Red Army’s epic struggle against the Wehrmacht. But his war drags on. Worse, it’s failing and threatening his grip on power.
Despite Putin’s boasts about Russian troops advancing on every front, even pro-war military bloggers are criticising military mismanagement. Some say the momentum favours Ukraine and at least one warns that Russia could lose. With the frontline stalled, an estimated 1.3 million Russian troops dead or wounded, and ordinary Russians under increasing economic pressure, the war Putin believed would produce his crowning achievement may prove to be his undoing.
For Russians, the war was once something that happened over there. Now it’s happening inside Russia itself. Ukraine’s drones and missiles routinely hit targets deep inside the country – often more than 1,500km from the border. They include Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Yaroslavl, Murmansk and the Baltic Sea oil-loading ports at Primorsk and Ust-Luga. The refineries at Tuapse, on the Black Sea’s northern coastline, and Yaroslavl have been set ablaze repeatedly. Ukrainian drones have also caused numerous airport closures and flight delays across Russia.
Ukraine’s relentless drone attacks forced Putin to pare back Saturday’s military parade. In a phone call with Donald Trump on April 29th, Putin floated the idea of a three-day ceasefire from May 9th to avoid the humiliation of a Ukrainian attack on Red Square. The Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, later accepted the proposal at Trump’s urging, especially because a prisoner exchange was included, but he didn’t allow Putin to avoid embarrassment completely: his official ceasefire decree exempted Red Square from attack, but not all of Russia.
The war has also battered Russia’s economy. The army and military industry’s huge appetite for manpower has created an acute labour shortage. That has produced a low unemployment rate (2.2 per cent in March), but it has also slowed economic growth, squeezed small businesses already reeling from tax increases and raised inflation as companies compete for workers. Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry reports that nearly two-thirds of small businesses didn’t turn a profit in the first quarter of this year. Economic growth fell from 4.9 per cent in 2024 to 1 per cent in 2025, and will probably remain at that level this year. But 2026 is already off to a bad start: GDP shrank by 0.3 per cent year-on-year during the first quarter.
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If things in the rear don’t look good, the same goes for the front. The Russian army’s advances this year have been minimal, in part because Ukrainian drone warfare has transformed the battlefield. For about two years, Russian commanders have struggled to mass armoured and mechanised units capable of punching through the 1,400km frontline and seizing territory because Ukraine’s ubiquitous drones quickly spot concentrations of men and material. Russia switched to sending small groups of soldiers to infiltrate Ukrainian lines and establish footholds for follow-on forces, but because drones strike infiltrating infantry so effectively, this adaptation won’t produce major advances.
Last year, Russia gained a mere 0.8 per cent of Ukrainian territory at the cost of more than 400,000 casualties, including 200,000 dead. Its momentum has slowed markedly this year, and in April it lost more territory than it captured – a first since the reverses in Kursk in the autumn of 2023 – though the ubiquity of drones can complicate precise assessments of territorial control. Although Russia may launch a big summer push in Donetsk, Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk still haven’t been fully conquered despite offensives that began there in the spring and summer of 2024, respectively.
Ukraine has certainly suffered substantial casualties (at least 300,000 soldiers and, according to some estimates, more than 500,000 – plus 59,000 civilians), extensive destruction and territorial losses of about 8 per cent since 2022 – and about 20 per cent since 2014. But these figures are unsurprising (as are Ukraine’s struggles with recruitment and retention), given Russia’s advantage in firepower; what is remarkable is the magnitude of Russian losses.
Those losses reflect Ukraine’s ramp-up of drone production and development of models that are harder to jam or shoot down. The early versions were followed by first-person view (FPV) drones (remotely operated through real-time video feeds), then fibre-optic models impervious to jamming, and most recently AI-assisted models. Ukraine has also started using aerial and ground-based autonomous systems for supplying the front, evacuating the wounded and even for assaults. Those successes have reduced its casualties while increasing Russia’s, which now equal the number of monthly recruits – roughly 35,000 – with drones accounting for 70-80 per cent of casualties.
The signs of anxiety within the Kremlin are unmistakable. Putin’s security cordon has been tightened, his travel within the country curtailed. Bocharov Ruchey, his Black Sea residence in Sochi, was demolished and rebuilt with added security. In contrast to Zelenskyy, he hasn’t visited frontline soldiers since March last year.
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The government has also clamped down on social media, blocking Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube. In February it started restricting access to Telegram, which nearly 50 per cent of Russians use for news and messaging, and in April moved towards a full ban. Last month, the Communist Party chief, Gennady Zyuganov, a stalwart Putin supporter, warned his fellow parliamentarians of the example of 1917, when wartime strains on society sparked two revolutions.
Though Putin’s fate isn’t necessarily sealed his war is floundering, and the signs of disquiet at the top are too numerous to dismiss. The Victory Day parade was meant to celebrate Russia’s martial glory; instead, it could prove to be a requiem for Putin’s military ambitions.
Rajan Menon is professor emeritus of international relations at Powell School, City University of New York, and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies – Guardian
